IA Lenses: Helpful perspectives for information architects
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![@ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 25
My job is
to consume ambiguity
and [excrete] clarity.”
— Karl Fast
“](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/brown-180324215515/75/ia-lenses-helpful-perspectives-for-information-architects-25-2048.jpg?cb=1668169789)
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IA Lenses: Helpful perspectives for information architects
- 1. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown IA Lenses Helpful Perspectives for Information Architects IA Summit — Chicago — March 2018 Dan Brown – @brownorama – @ialenses
- 2. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 2 What’s a lens? Category Title Description Prompts Key Question
- 3. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 3 There are 44 of them
- 4. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 4 There are 44 of them44
- 5. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 5
- 6. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 6
- 7. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 7 I know, right? 😳 🤪 🤪
- 8. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 8 Where did lenses come from?
- 9. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 9 Observation 1: Ambiguous Labels I can’t tell the difference between research and publications.
- 10. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 10 Challenge 2: Lack of Context Nothing tells me what the World Bank really does.
- 11. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 11 Challenge 3: Value of Persistent Navigation I wish the navigation helped me understand where I am.
- 12. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 12 Challenge 3: Value of Persistent Navigation I can’t tell the difference between research and publications. Nothing tells me what the World Bank really does. I wish the navigation helped me understand where I am.
- 13. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 13 After observing, we ask… Ambiguous labels Lack of context Persistent navigation I can’t tell the difference between research and publications. Nothing tells me what the World Bank really does. I wish the navigation helped me understand where I am.
- 14. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 14 After observing, we ask… Ambiguous labels Lack of context Are there clearer words? Can users grok what’s available? Persistent navigation What would actually help users? I wish the navigation helped me understand where I am. I can’t tell the difference between research and publications. Nothing tells me what the World Bank really does.
- 15. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 15 What else can we ask? Are there clearer words? Can users grok what’s available? What would actually help users? How will this be maintained? Will this distract users? Who benefits most from this structure? Which one of these items is not like the others?How can this increase user confidence? Does this tell a story? How difficult to build? What precedent does this set? What’s the shelf-life? What burden does this place on the menu? How do we support exploration?
- 16. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 16 Why is this important? 🤪
- 17. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 17 IA → scary consequences 🤪
- 18. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 18 Pace Layers NATURE CULTURE GOVERNANCE INFRASTRUCTURE COMMERCE
- 19. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 19 Pace Layers CULTURE GOVERNANCE INFRASTRUCTURE COMMERCE ART/FASHION SLOWER FASTER
- 20. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 20 Pace Layers CULTURE STRUCTURE NAVIGATION UI DESIGN VISUAL DESIGN
- 21. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 21 Pace Layers CULTURE STRUCTURE NAVIGATION UI DESIGN VISUAL DESIGN
- 22. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 22 IA deals with the abstract ☁️
- 23. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 23 Researching Analyzing Consulting Informing Funding “country” “topic”“region” “practice”
- 24. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 24 Critique makes things better 🔬
- 25. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 25 My job is to consume ambiguity and [excrete] clarity.” — Karl Fast “
- 26. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 26 Lenses give us questions to ask ourselves
- 27. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 27 Lenses give us questions to ask ourselves
- 28. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 28 Lenses give us perspectives but not the right answers 💥 💥 💥 💥 💥
- 29. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 29 Using the lenses Who we are Where we work What we do Understanding poverty Work with us
- 30. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 30 Example 1: Lens of Stability Who we are Where we work What we do Understanding poverty Work with us
- 31. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 31 Example 1: Lens of Stability Who we are Where we work What we do Understanding poverty Work with us
- 32. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 32 Example 2: Lens of Narrative Who we are Where we work What we do Understanding poverty Work with us
- 33. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 33 Example 2: Lens of Narrative Who we are Where we work What we do Understanding poverty Work with us
- 34. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 34 Example 2: Lens of Narrative We face big challenges to help the world’s poorest people and ensure that everyone sees benefits from economic growth. Data and research help us understand these challenges and set priorities, share knowledge of what works, and measure progress. Data & Research - By country - By indicator Development Priorities - Climate change - Education - Energy - Conflict & Violence - Poverty - Sustainability - Trade - Health Who we are Where we work What we do Understanding poverty Work with us
- 35. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 35 Example 3: Lens of Multiple Homes We face big challenges to help the world’s poorest people and ensure that everyone sees benefits from economic growth. Data and research help us understand these challenges and set priorities, share knowledge of what works, and measure progress. Data & Research - By country - By indicator Development Priorities - Climate change - Education - Energy - Conflict & Violence - Poverty - Sustainability - Trade - Health Who we are Where we work What we do Understanding poverty Work with us
- 36. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 36 Lenses are a new tool Not a replacement 🔨
- 37. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 37 Lenses let me re-examine what I do 🤪
- 38. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 38 Lenses let me re-examine what I do 🤪
- 39. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown
- 40. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 40
- 41. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 41
- 42. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 42
- 43. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 43
- 44. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown
- 45. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 45 What am I really struggling with? Who we are Where we work What we do Understanding poverty Work with us We face big challenges to help the world’s poorest people and ensure that everyone sees benefits from economic growth. Data and research help us understand these challenges and set priorities, share knowledge of what works, and measure progress. Data & Research - By country - By indicator Development Priorities - Climate change - Education - Energy - Conflict & Violence - Poverty - Sustainability - Trade - Health
- 46. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 46 I know what you’re thinking… 🤪
- 47. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 47 Sorry… 🤪
- 48. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 48 Can we see them work one more time?
- 49. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 49 You get a lens and… You get a lens and… You get a lens and… You get a lens and… You get a lens and… You get a lens and…
- 50. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 50 Everybody gets a lens!
- 51. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 51 Now your turn… 👀 1. Review your lens. Read the description, prompts, and key question. 2. Look at the site through the perspective of the lens. 3. Write down what thoughts the lens provokes. You have three minutes
- 52. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 52
- 53. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown Now your turn… 👀 1. Review your lens. Read the description, prompts, and key question. 2. Look at the site through perspective of your lens. 3. Write down what thoughts the lens provokes. 🤪 When I call on you… 1. Tell us your name. 2. Tell us the name of your lens. 3. Read the key question. 4. Tell us what it revealed to you. You have three minutes
- 54. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 54 Follow Lenses on Twitter
- 55. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 55 Send me your thoughts dan@eightshapes.com
- 56. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 56 What I’m working on now… 1 2 3 4 5 🏁 UNIFIED NAVIGATION / GUIDE / PORTAL / DASHBOARD / LAUNCHPAD THING
- 57. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 57 There’s work to be done.
- 58. @ialenses — EightShapes — Dan Brown 58 Thank you!Dan Brown @brownorama @ialenses
Editor's Notes
- There are lots of different parts to the lens. The title gives us a simple reminder of what this lens is about. The description fills in some background information or foundational information to help us use the lens. But the essence of the lens is the key question. It’s the key question that gives you something you can ask yourself about the work you’re doing. Ultimately, I think of lenses as perspectives: different ways of looking at a structure. Here’s a complete set of lenses.
- Wait for it
- Wait for it
- Wait for it
- Wait for it
- When I first started making this list of lenses, I thought I’d maybe have a dozen or so. When I would think of one, I’d think of another. Some of the lenses overlap, no doubt. But this is why the metaphor of the lens appeals: it’s a perspective. Two perspectives may be related or similar, but are still unique, distinct vantages. By the way, after Prof Bates’ talk this morning, I may need to add another few lenses. Especially browsing. Abby and Jenny’s talk makes me think I could add Seasonality as a lens.
- Though I started working on the lenses in the last few years, it’s really a reflection of the cumulative knowledge of 20+ years of practice. I wrote an article about 10 years ago about the principles of IA, and I stood on this stage and described them to the IA community. They seemed to resonate. Working on deep IA problems, I decided to update that article. And I realized how far my thinking had come. As we worked with the World Bank to update their navigation, I started making note of the kinds of observations I made…
- Why so many questions? Why should we bother digging into our IA like this? Does having a set of questions like this really improve our practice? Well, I’m going to make the case. There are three parts to my case.
- Part 1: IA has scary consequences We want to be able to uncover consequences as early as possible We want to be ready for risks You have to live with these structures for a while You have to ask yourself, “Can I easily answer the question, where does this live?” Structures are harder to change than content What types of risks: New content doesn’t have a good place to go Categories too broad as to be meaningless Menu designs that dominate the UI Menus become obsolete as the messaging strategy evolves Categories become obsolete as the business evolves
- Let’s dig into these scary consequences. You might remember Stewart Brand’s pace layers concept. The simple explanation here is that the world is made up of different structures. TRANSITION
- Things like governance and infrastructure and culture and nature are all different environments in which we people participate. Those closer to the center of the circle change much slower than the ones further out. Recall that Steward Brand is an architect, and that he was looking at the different layers of a building. The decor of the rooms is at the outer layer; the engineered structural elements are at the center. There’s friction at the boundaries between layers. Things that change in one layer impact the elements of another.
- If we draw a parallel to our work, we can see that the work we do on a site’s navigation or the underlying structure of a product can have an impact. Changes there impact the user interface and even the visual design. But we need to make the navigation and structural decisions first, or at least concurrently with UI decisions. Therefore, we want to get those right.
- Either way, I said Pace Layer at an IA conference, CLICK so DRINK. OK, so IA decisions — those about structure and navigation — are important because they are tied to the other decisions we have to make.
- OK: So this is important because IA has scary consequences Part 2: IA works in a world that is abstract Though it’s not completely disconnected from reality, the connections are not immediately visible We’re talking about looking at the underlying patterns of a domain, so we can translate that into a system for way finding We’re talking about looking at the underlying concepts in a domain, so we can translate that into a system for rendering content
- When we were dealing with the World Bank, their world is made up of many different concepts. Those concepts can be difficult to pin down, overlap, and intersect in weird and interesting ways. As designers, we need to think through as much of that as possible, so that as we create the structures that accommodate these concepts, we can do so in the context of the larger design effort. Our work on building structures is intentional: we’re being deliberate about how things fit together. Boiko talked about starting with the screen, and that this is problematic because the screens are a consequence of the structure. Why do we do this? Because we’re working in abstractions and we need people to react to those structures.
- Here’s Part 3: We need critique to make things better. To truly be deliberate, to be rigorous, we need meaningful input into our work Critique is the engine of design We are designing structures, therefore we need critique to help improve those structures Structures are abstract That is: it’s difficult to critique what you cannot see
- So, IA is abstract, it’s design, and as design it requires critique. Yet, critiquing abstract things is hard. By forcing ourselves to answer difficult questions, we have the next best thing after critique We have a mechanism for interrogating our own designs We have ways for you designers to occupy different perspectives.
- By forcing ourselves to answer difficult questions, we have the next best thing after critique Lenses give us a mechanism for critiquing — I like to say interrogating — our own designs They give us a way to occupy different perspectives.
- And perspectives are the key to design If critique is the engine, then perspectives are the fuel Car analogies end there By adopting different perspectives, we can see our decisions a new way, and determine whether those decisions are appropriate or good in a way that we couldn’t before I’ve got wireframes here, but these could easily be spreadsheets of content, taxonomy outlines, site maps. Yesterday Andy Fitzgerald said he modeled the content of his CC project, and just by putting it into a spreadsheet, he could have a conversation with his client. The argument I just built yielded the idea that sometimes you can’t have meaningful constructive conversations with people about abstractions.
- Perhaps the foundation for this design was grounded in simplifying the language and teaching users about what’s available Those are admirable and useful perspectives, but they’re not the only ones Our colleagues inside the World Bank suggested these titles initially. It was our role to validate and elaborate.
- Looking at this architecture from this perspective means asking myself: how long will these categories be meaningful
- Looking at this architecture from this perspective means asking myself: how long will these categories be meaningful One of the things we looked at was: does the navigation rely on concepts that are going to change or expire?
- Looking at this architecture with the lens of narrative means asking myself how the navigation tells a story, one that’s meaningful to the users, and one that highlights the important themes, not necessarily all of them.
- Looking at this architecture with the lens of multiple homes means asking myself about the role of “country” in these menus. In this domain, “country” is a lot of things. It’s a source of information, it’s a filter, and it’s a container that includes lots of other kinds of information. This doesn’t give me the right answer as to what to do with “country” but it does help draw attention to the challenge. So my decisions can be more deliberate.
- The point here isn’t to change what you do But instead elevate it Perhaps make it more rigorous
- I identified eight categories of lenses. By categorizing the lenses, what I realized is that I juggle a variety of concerns. I’m going to define each of these by contrasting them with another. This isn’t to say that these contrasts are purposeful or unique to that pair. Instead, it’s just a useful vehicle for telling the story.
- One interesting distinction between how we represent the structure and how we help people get where they’re going. Presenting means illustrating the structure. Guiding means directing them to their destination. So, for presenting, I include scannability. Looking through this lens, we can question whether the presentation of the structure allows us to quickly glean in. In guiding, I include exemplars, embedding examples of categories as a way of explaining the category. When we look through this lens, we ask whether the user would benefit from an example of a member of the category.
- As an information architect, I’m looking at how the structures establish containers for the product’s content. I’m also looking at how the structures I build can grow and change when challenged by new kinds of content, or content that isn’t a perfect fit. Classifying includes the lens Apples to Apples which helps me make sure the members of a category are all at the same level, and roughly deal with the same kinds of things. Flexing includes the lens of burden, which challenges me to see if I haven’t tried to put too much responsibility on the shoulders of the structure.
- Structures aren’t just for users: they’re for the people who must maintain them. Therefore, some of the lenses look at the structure from the perspective of someone who has to manage the content within it. Others look at the structure from the perspective of having to explain the structure to other people. Precedence is one of my favorite lenses, and its in the manage category. Structures establish precedents. By doing it one way one time, am I prepared to do it that way every time. Exceptions make structures harder to manage than hard-and-fast rules. Meanwhile physical metaphors is a lens for explaining. By looking at my structure through that lens, I ask whether I can use a reference to the physical world to help someone else understand it.
- Finally, as the designer of a structure, I seek to make it meaningful to the users. Engaging users means drawing them into the structure to let them feel like they can participate. Including users means making sure no user group feels like the structure was designed without their needs in mind. That the structure isn’t actively trying to keep them out. In engaging I have the lens of label/concept fit, because people recognize and understand structures primarily through labels. They are drawn in when the labels fit their understanding of the concept. In including, I have the lens of who benefits, which asks us to look at our structures from the perspective of which user groups stands to gain the most from the structure being the way it is. This was a new way of looking at structures for me.
- After arriving at this list, I felt like I had a good handle on what we actually do. I’ve been doing this since 1995, so you can imagine that that felt pretty good.
- ANDY: The tools don’t lend themselves to simulation and iteration
- 3:30 How do I get a hold of these lenses?
- What you’re really thinking is…
- Let’s see them work one more time
- Let’s see them work one more time
- Let’s see them work one more time
- Tell us the name of your lens Tell us the main prompt Then tell us what it revealed to you
- Tell us the name of your lens Tell us the main prompt Then tell us what it revealed to you
- Boiko said we need to stand up and make IA a thing. How do you make it a thing: ask great questions. This stuff is getting harder. We’re facing pressure from users to have more elegant systems. Not their fault. We’re facing pressure from the businesses to try to do more online. Not their fault. We’re facing pressure from our society to be smarter – more inclusive, more sensitive, and more responsible. If you’re anything like me, you perceive the domain itself – whether hospitality or transportation or finance or architecture or immigration or entertainment – as exerting more pressure on us. More pressure to translate ideas with long histories into screens.